Like an impressionist painting -- if you look at it up close, you can see how rough the brush strokes are and how little it resembles reality, but you're not supposed to look at it up close; you're just supposed to look at the broad strokes and get a general feel for what it's trying to convey.

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Except that, with respect to that kind of impressionistic painting, you're supposed to be impressed that the image is composed of what look like random blobs of color up close. In addition to regarding it from afar, you are also supposed to examine it up close, at least to the extent needed to marvel at the technique. Seeing how the illusion is done, or at least that there actually is an illusion happening, is part of the viewing experience for that kind of painting.

On the other hand, seeing how a magic trick is done generally isn't a part of the experience of viewing a magic act. For the stardate illusion to work, we aren't supposed to examine the sequences too closely over all the episodes.

^Well, I think both analogies apply. That's kind of what I did in the last post -- explaining the technique behind the illusion, the reasons why, in the context of the way television was made and broadcast in the 1960s, it made sense to create the illusion only in broad strokes. I think too many viewers today don't think about how much our modern perception of TV is shaped by things like home video and the Internet and the like, things they simply didn't have back then. Understanding how different things were back then, why they couldn't and wouldn't have made decisions the same way they do now, helps give us more appreciation of the work they did.

Actually, come to think about it, saying "star date" is a shout-out that it's all make-believe, kind of like, "Once upon a time," in it's own way. So, maybe you are supposed to notice the broad strokes part, too.